Tools and rituals.
Hand and face as deterritorializing agents
1. Tools and rituals
How to think human beings both in
their evolutionary continuity with other hominids and predecessors, as well as
in the radical change they have brought into the evolution? In philosophy,
humans are often taken ready-made with a language and technology, and then one
marvels at their extraordinariness. In evolutionary science, humans are taken as
the outcome of a series of small steps, and in the end, one may lose sight of
the radical innovation that they represent.
From the Western viewpoint, two of
the most striking differences between humans and animals are that humans have
language and a developed toolkit, whereas animals have much more restricted
forms of communication and signals, and much more limited use of tools. Yet it
is important that animals also do express themselves and use sign systems for
communication, and that they also use tools (nests; needles of plants to
capture insects; cobwebs; and apes can even use a combined set of two or more
tools (to move a box under a banana, then climb on top of it, and use the stick
to catch the banana). Humans do not come out of nowhere; in evolution there are
always precedents and often parallel evolutions.
From the viewpoint of the Chinese philosophy,
the greatest difference between humans and animals is that humans have rituals li
禮, while animals do not, at least in the most developed sense. All
animals, they affirmed, know their mother, but only humans pay a special respect
also to the father.[1]
And humans do not forget the gift parents have made them by giving birth to
them and nourishing them while they were young, so that when parents are old,
children support them in turn, and when they die, they mourn for them for three
years (at three, humans are weaned, and mourning should last the same time). Still,
the authors do recognize precedents for different kinds of rituals in animals;
for instance, it is said that the crows feed their parents, eagles recognize
sexual difference, bees and ants recognize the relation of ruler and subject, jackals
ritual make offerings of animals and beaves make ritual offerings of fish.
2. “Inter-world” of tools and
community
In the following I try to show that
both the Western focus on utensils and the Chinese focus on family and
community are equally important aspects in the emergence of humans.
First, let us reflect, what does the
use of tools mean. It means the creation of a special realm so to say “between”
the subject and its surroundings. The subject has its natural “tools”, so to
say: its body. In the case of humans, feet and especially hands are the
preferred tools to create changes in the environment (to catch, hold,
manipulate a thing) and to reinforce social relations (grooming is vital among
the apes in maintaining social relations). And, on the other hand, the subject
has certain items in the surroundings that interest it (a banana, a worm, a
companion). Tools are ontologically situated between these realms. They are not
objects of immediate consumption (although they may acquire also this aspect: from
early on, hand axes become also aesthetically pleasing, especially with the
symmetrical axes of Acheul technique), but they are first of all for something
else. Like our body is for our projects and projects itself into the
world, so the tools do the same, with the difference that they can be replaced,
repaired, discarded and reused; i.e. they are not a biological part of our
body, but an extension of it.
The biological body, in turn, becomes
less specific, thanks to the tools. If insects want to be good at specific
tasks, they have developed certain organic parts or even polymorphic forms of a
species (e.g. the different forms of termites or ants, corresponding to their
tasks: workers, warriors, queen, etc.), but the downside with this strategy is
that they become locked in those forms: if your hand has been evolved into pincers,
it will not evolve back into hand. And it will take an evolutionary scale of
time to develop that organ. Human body, in contrast, is relatively
undetermined. Just two hands with five fingers each; but with the help of tools
they can perform an astonishing number of different tasks.
It means that the body can be connected
to more counterparts in the surroundings: the body can perform acts that it could
not do otherwise, or could not do so well (crack nuts with a striking-stone and
an anvil-stone; cut things with a sharp edge of a stone; to hold a javelin and pierce
with it a prey, at the same time extending this piercing power to the length of
the javelin shaft; to throw a stone or a
javelin and to perform an action at an even greater distance; etc.). With different
tools, human body can connect to more counterparts; it uses intermediaries (the
tools, that are for something else), and hence is less compellingly tied
to the particular counterparts of its action in the surroundings, because they
are mediated by tools and the subject can change the tool it uses, as a
kind of temporary exoskeleton.
So, with the help of tools, the subject
becomes spatially more powerful, tools bring its world into the second power.
And correspondingly the subject becomes more articulated temporally.
First of all, while preparing a tool, she is not satisfying an immediate need,
but postponing that satisfaction for the time of that preparation, in view of a
more secure and enhanced satisfaction in the future. So, the body
becomes more “disciplined”, segmenting time more powerfully[3].
Also, on a smaller scale, during the preparation of a stone axe, it involves a
series of actions (which become more nuanced and sequenced during the evolution
of tool-preparing techniques): you have to first strike here and then
there, in order to obtain the result. Or, on a bigger scale, humans start
to alternate working period and festivities (that articulate the time like the
nodes of a bamboo 節日, which also entails a regulation, discipline
or even an askesis between the festivities – another meaning of 節, to discipline
and moderate oneself).
So, the possession of future by the
subject becomes wider and more nuanced. And it involves also an enhanced presence
of the past and the development of memory: tool-preparing techniques are
part of the cultural heritage, of community memory. Just as tools form a kind
of “interworld” between the subjects and their surroundings, in a parallel way
community forms a kind of intermediate zone between individual and species. Of
course, several other animals live in communities, bands, prides, herds, etc.,
but in case of tool-preparing creatures it acquires a special ontological
status: the formation of cultural memory and the group as the bearer of that
memory.
Face is the privileged site of communication inside
the group. Human face has an astonishing number of muscles that can express a
huge variety of emotions that convey nuanced social meanings. As humans’
interactions with the surroundings became more nuanced and multiple, also the
inter-group interactions became more nuanced; more kinds of meanings had to be
expressed.
And it is interesting that while
human body is quite underdetermined, thanks to the use of tools, also human
sexes present only a moderate dimorphism: men and women differ less than males
and females of chimpanzees or gorillas, for example. Yet, there is a noticeable
dimorphism, different from swans, for example, so that sexual difference has
maintained an important role in the organization of human societies; first of
all, in the rules of marriages. It must have been very important in early
societies that lived in small groups over large territories, so that there was
the danger of intermarriage, with the possible deleterious outcomes of genetic
disorder; so that exogamy was very important. Perhaps some of the earliest signs
and symbols were used in that context: my band gives a young female to your
band, and your band gives me a token that symbolizes that your band “owes” me a
female.
It seems plausible that human language
arose first not so much for utilitarian purposes (hunters and gatherers know
what to do even without talking; indeed talking may be prohibited in order not
to frighten away prey or displease spirits), but from gossip and “small talk”
with mostly phatic role – i.e. the role of maintaining contact between interlocutors).
3. Humans as a gradual leap of
evolution
So, the two approaches mentioned in
the beginning: tools and rituals, are both essential in the evolution of
humans. Tools superimpose a distinction on the biological realm, by
creating an “interworld” of things that are valid not so much in themselves
than for something else, that is – tools.[4] It
involves a more powerful mastering of future (to prepare a tool in order to
later do something; during the preparation the various technical phases of it) and
past (the toolkit, stored in the cultural memory of the community). And by rituals
the human community obtains a special ontological relevance as bearer of
cultural meanings, memory, values. This is the basis of the enhanced grasp of
past and future. It inevitably involves the development of rituals that
regulate the growing number of different relations inside the group (as parallel
to a greater number of interactions with the surroundings, by the means of
tools).
Language can be seen as a by-product
of holding contact inside the group. It is known that the language center in
human brain is close to the motor center, so that it is very probable that language
was first mainly gestural; it may have been accompanied by sounds from the very
start, but it seems plausible that the development of a fully articulated
phonal language took long time, because it requires an extraordinary command of
the tongue and other parts of the phonatory apparatus, in order to make the phonetic
distinctions, and it taxes also the brain to memorize all the phonemes,
morphemes, words, and to form sentences.
Hands and face, as they become capable
of doing more different things and expressing more different feelings, become
in a sense “deterritorialized”[5] or
decontextualized, they lose their identity as a thing, and they become conduits
for intentions – towards the surroundings (tools) and towards fellow beings
(face). And via this deterritorialization or decontextualization they become
territories of new kinds of subjects, individual persons – in the sense of
having a personal “style”. We “lose our face” and we “lose our hands” as
things, and we win them as conduits for the becomings, transformations, Way, dao.
So, the leap from animals to humans is
not so mysterious, unexplainable and spectacular as many philosophers think,
but there has been a long process of unspectacular development. Yet, we can see
that an evolutionary breakthrough is obtained in this process. Humans, with
their toolkit, language and social techniques can be said to represent a major
evolutionary leap, comparable to the emergence of life itself, or to the development,
for example, of multicellular organisms in the biological evolution.
[1]
Of course, this is not entirely correct from today’s viewpoint: in several
species it is the male that occupies of the offspring, or both male and female;
and in most species – as far as I know – the offspring does not recognize its
parent(s) after it has reached maturity, and does not apply a special treatment
to them.
[4]
This is not entirely new in evolution: all kinds of ornaments are for
something else: mating, warning, luring. But in case of human tools these things-for-something-else
become more numerous and detached from the biological body.
[5]
This is a concept of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It
means very broadly a process of decontextualization, and it is accompanied by „reterritorializations“
in new contexts. For example, the flower of an orchid becomes „deterritorialized“,
detached from its context, and reterritorialized on the fly that pollinates it,
so that it becomes fly-like. Beings occasionally deterritorialize each other,
and by this create new reterritorializations.
